57 per cent of all web traffic is automated and climbing as AI upends search, discovery and commerce. Marketers are watching page views tank – down 20-30 per cent in Australia this year – and scrambling for answers to a fundamental question: When a machine, not a person, discovers, compares, and recommends your brand, what exactly are you optimising for as currency moves from click to LLM citations?

The new reality is that a consumer can meet a brand, weigh it up, and walk away with a recommendation without ever touching the brand’s website, its own media, or any single thing that marketing controls.

Marketers, says Marie Joyce, GM of News Australia’s Suddenly, are concerned. 

“There absolutely is a sense of panic. Their page views are through the floor. There’s a lot of pressure from internal stakeholders; they're also starting to see some impact on the bottom line as well.” Most, she says are, “unsure where to start”.

News Australia’s Head of Search and Emerging Platforms, Mike Cook does know where to start: “With an audit of how you’re showing up – and how your competitors are showing up.”

After that, Marie has a five-point plan – and it’s working for the likes of Chemist Warehouse, which notched “a 219 per cent increase in Google AI overviews, and a 283 per cent spike in AI brand mentions” for its House of Wellness media network.

In short? Give both humans and bots what they want in a single hit:

1. Implement the 50-word rule. “Give the answer in the very first paragraph of your content. Don't make humans or bots dig for it.”
2. Prioritise facts over fluff. “Swap out generic marketing speak for real data, hard numbers, and verified expert quotes.”
3. “Build a knowledge web and create one main authoritative page that links out to smaller, hyper-detailed sub articles. This layout proves to AI that you understand a whole topic, not just a key single word.”
4. Structure for machines: “Use listicles, FAQs, and tables. AI loves these formats because they are easy to ingest and serve up the answers quickly.”
5. Prove it with links: “Link out to trusted official government or industry websites and experts. This builds out immediate trust and data viability for both humans and bots.”

Simultaneously, per Marie, “stop chasing the volume game”, because ironically, the LLMs are now filtering out “AI slop” and upweighting quality, trusted content. “The rules of great content still apply”.

Those rules must be applied across all channels – including the ones marketing has little or no control over. Which means de-siloing across marketing, comms, corporate affairs, media and customer experience.

The good news for CMOs? Fundamentals remain paramount.

“What we're seeing now is the more interconnected these platforms can be the more beneficial it will be for brands. This is … going back to the old way of thinking on consistency of brand … across channels,” says Marie. “Those things that we know embed memory structure for humans also now meet the needs of bots.”